Being Well, Being Me: The Effect of Perceived Group Inclusion and Social Identity on Eudaimonic Workplace Well-Being
Open AccessOne challenge of being a multifaceted, complex individual (as human beings are) is feeling less included among those with whom one works. In those instances, individuals may struggle to bring their full identities to bear among their work teams and thus forgo greater well-being. Building on the theoretical framework of Social Identity Theory, this study explored three theoretical concepts—perceived group inclusion, multiple social identity integration, and eudaimonic well-being—among engineers as a particular subset of the professional workforce with a distinct professional identity (Atadero et al., 2018; Huff et al., 2019), history of exclusion (Friedensen et al., 2020; Secules, 2019), and common practice of working on teams. The qualities of eudaimonic well-being—growth, purpose, authenticity, and self-realization—made it an especially valuable lens for understanding how inclusion and identity relate to well-being in the workplace. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to predict eudaimonic workplace well-being based on data collected through a survey of working engineers in the United States (N = 601). The online survey designed for this study combined three previously validated instruments assessing the central variables of this study: perceived group inclusion (Jansen et al., 2014), multiple social identity integration (Yampolsky et al., 2016), and eudaimonic workplace well-being (Bartels et al., 2019). An analysis of the data from this survey answered two research questions: 1) What is the direct effect of perceived group inclusion on eudaimonic well-being at work? and 2) Does multiple identity integration mediate the relationship between perceived group inclusion and eudaimonic well-being? The findings of this study indicate that perceived group inclusion has a positive, direct effect on eudaimonic workplace well-being. Although the impact of a person’s multiple social identities was not clearly determined, the significance of inclusion maintains the centrality of a person’s identity in predicting eudaimonic workplace well-being. As a result, the findings of this study point to the predictive power of perceived inclusion among people’s work teams to predict states of being such as eudaimonic well-being. Inclusion among one’s workplace team may also offset exclusion in other areas and ultimately provide an important lens through which to focus efforts to help workers access the beneficial qualities of eudaimonic workplace well-being. The significance of this study highlights the potential power of work teams to create inclusive environments that may positively affect its members. It also spotlights eudaimonic well-being as a valuable theoretical construct within the arena of well-being to engage meaningfully in research and in practice.
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